In 1901, the Yankton Sioux writer and activist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (1876-1938) published Old Indian Legends under the Lakota name Zitkála-Šá (Red Bird). Though originally marketed as a collection of traditional Sioux stories for children, Legends functions on a much deeper level. Viewed within historical context, the book constitutes both an assertion of Sioux cultural resilience, and a condemnation of white society's damaging encroachment on indigenous lands. It is unsurprising that these themes emerge. A year before Legends’ appearance, the 1900 US census recorded only approximately 320,000 Natives remaining in the United States – the lowest number on record (Meisenheimer 1997: 114-115). Zitkála-Šá's Sioux Nation (like many other indigenous nations) had been severely affected over the previous 50 years by territorial loss, the American bison's near-extinction, an imposed farming regime based on land allotment, and traumas such as the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, in which more than 2,000 Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota perished at the hands of the Seventh Calvary (Pritzker 2000: 329-330). In Zitkála-Šá's birthplace, Yankton Reservation, the population had meanwhile declined precipitously to under 2,000 due to chicken pox, measles, influenza, and other European diseases (Susag 1993: 13). These upheavals form the backdrop to Old Indian Legends, in which Zitkála-Šá creates a narrative arch that, this paper argues, forecasts a cultural victory for the Sioux over white society.

Zitkála-Šá wrote Legends in her early 20s, at a major turning point in her life. She had been born in 1876 to a Yankton Sioux mother, Ellen Taté Iyóhiwin Simmons (1830?-1914), and delinquent white father who either died or abandoned his family that same year. At age eight Zitkála-Šá, then named Gertrude Simmons, left her mother's tepee by the Missouri River under the care of Quaker missionaries who promised to educate her at White's Manual Labor Institute, a boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. The school was one of many that accepted Indian students in the late 1800s under a campaign of Indian assimilation heavily promoted by the US government. Its expressed goal was to defeat “savagery” through Christianization and a severing of Native children from their parents and the “heathen” values they instilled.